The talk focused on how the guys (with some help from other sources, including Joe Damato and Aman Gupta) have dug into MRI Ruby 1.8's internals to get some significant memory usage and thread performance improvements for their Ruby Enterprise Edition branch (they're not calling it a fork) of Ruby 1.8.

The video is presented in HD so the slides are easy to see and the audio is solid. If taking a small trip through Ruby's garbage collection, memory allocation, and threading system sounds good to you (or you just want to know what Ruby Enterprise Edition is all about), it's a must watch. If you want some practical Ruby stuff and don't care about what the interpreter's doing, give it a miss.

The talk felt like a pretty good peer review on the Ruby 1.8 code base. This is good. Mr. Bui and Mr. Lai made the complex inner workings of the C code very understandable. There should be many more tech talks about threads, garbage collection strategies, and memory management! These topics are quite, shall we say, mature and there is a lot of new things happening in this area that can help even the 1.9 code base.